It’s gradually becoming clear to me that this blogging thing is old hat. It’s a Web 4.0 world now, and we’re all just Tmblng through it. So, I need to get with modernity, and start posting the listicles that are the bread and butter of the new social media order. Thus, I give you a web-friendly list of The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons.

The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. More importantly, it’s what we use to see with– this blog post is transmitted to you using photons passing through fiber-optic cables, and then displayed on a monitor screen and transmitted to your eyes by yet more photons passing through the intervening air. Unless you’re visually impaired, and having this read to you. Or you’re Cory Doctorow, having this post beamed into your visual cortex through a direct neural interface. But even then, there’s still the fiber-optic thing. So, photons are very cool, no matter what Rhett says.

2) The W+ Boson

The W+ boson, in a highly sophisticated graphic put together by the crack team at Chateau Steelypips.

The positively charged carrier of the weak nuclear force, the W boson is responsible for nuclear decays that convert quarks into leptons and neutrinos. Predicted in the late 1960’s, their discovery in the mid-1980’s cemented the success of the Standard Model of particle physics.

3) The Z0 Boson

A plush Z boson, from the Particle Zoo.

The Z boson is the neutral carrier of the weak nuclear force, which was also predicted in the 60’s and detected in the 80’s. It’s responsible for elastic scattering of neutrinos, and does not involve changing particles from one type to another.

An image of a W- boson put together by the crack graphic design team at Chateau Steelypips.

The negatively charged carrier of the weak nuclear force. Really, pretty much the same thing as the W+ boson, only with the opposite charge. This is the point in the listicle where you begin to suspect that we’re short on content and just padding this out because nobody would click through to a listicle that only had four items, one for each of the fundamental forces.

5) The Graviton

The cover of Thunderbolts #17, featuring the villain Graviton.

The graviton is, as the name would suggest, the carrier of gravity. It’s neutral, with spin 2, and there is, as yet, no really good theory of quantum gravity, so the properties of gravitons remain somewhat indeterminate.

It’s traditional to pad out a listicle by stretching one actual thing over at least two items, and photons are cool enough to deserve two spots. So, here’s a YouTube video of U2 playing one of my favorite songs, because videos are also an important component of a successful listicle.

7)-14) Gluons

Animated GIF of the exchange of photons between the quarks in a neutron.

Gluons are the carriers of the strong nuclear force, and come in eight different varieties carrying different combinations of color charge, depending on what they’re connecting. This is the point where we’re starting to lose interest in writing this listicle, and mash a bunch of stuff together into a single item. Also, it wouldn’t be a real listicle without an animated GIF.

15) Smee

Mr. Smee from Jake and the Never Land Pirates. Image from Disney Wikia.

He might technically be a mate, not a bosun, but I’ve never been real clear on those naval ranks from the age of sail. One thing is clear, though: Smee is the carrier of Captain Hook’s will. Whenever a scheme comes together, even for a moment, Smee is the one who made it work. Which leaves open the important question of just why he keeps hanging around with that one-handed nincompoop.

Also, this is the point in the listicle where we realize we counted the number of possible items wrong, but can’t go back to change the title, because we need to plow ahead and generate the next linkbait content for driving traffic to the site.

Related Posts:

52 Cool Things About Einstein That Are Actually 26 Cool Things But Half of Them Are Split Over Three Items to Inflate the Count

37 Famous Scientists Talking Smack About Subjects Outside Their Field of Expertise

122 Inspirational Quotes About Physics Pasted Over Uncredited Images I Copied from Flickr

27 Facts About Nikola Tesla that Oh, God, Who Gives a Shit? Enough With Tesla, Already

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(This started as a Twitter joke on a Saturday morning, but the 15 Force Carrying Bosons list idea lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away. So you get this.)

Comments

When I first saw 15 in the title I thought that was way too high; not being a particle guy I did not think about the different charges. So I wondered if you were going to include quasiparticle excitations in condensed matter, e.g. phonons binding Cooper pairs.

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing